The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management (2nd Ed)

- This is a technical reference book (2nd edition, 2024) about automatic memory management — specifically "garbage collection" (GC), the behind-the-scenes process that reclaims memory no longer used by a program. - Covers the major GC algorithms used in languages like Java, Go, Python, JavaScript, C#, Ruby, and Swift: tracing, reference counting, generational collection, concurrent & real-time collectors, and the trade-offs each makes between throughput, latency, and memory overhead. - Authors Richard Jones (University of Kent), Antony Hosking (Australian National University), and Eliot Moss (UMass Amherst) are longtime academic researchers in the field. The first edition (2012) became the standard graduate-level text and practitioner reference. - Particularly relevant today because modern applications (e.g., low-latency trading, game engines, large-scale cloud services) push GC performance to its limits, and the book explains how state-of-the-art collectors like Java's ZGC and Go's concurrent GC actually work.